The ELLE 25

In a year of head-hanging cultural low points (were looking at you, Jersey Shore), ELLE presents the 25 best reasons to keep the faithfrom the years must-hear genre-busting albums to Chers showstopping return to celluloid. (We

In a year of head-hanging cultural low points (we're looking at you, Jersey Shore), ELLE presents the 25 best reasons to keep the faith—from the year's must-hear genre-busting albums to Cher's showstopping return to celluloid. (We'll fist pump to that!)

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When rapper Kid Cudi released Man on the Moon: The End of Day last fall, his emotive hip-hop outcooled every thugged-out MC on the market. Almost overnight, the 26-year-old, dressed in skinny jeans and thick-frame glasses, sold nearly half a million albums, lent vocals to Jay-Z's "Already Home" on The Blueprint 3, and became a lead player in HBO's dramedy How to Make It in America. On September 14, he'll release Man on the Moon Pt. 2: The Legend of Mr. Rager, a sophomore effort that upstages his first, with booming choruses (Cudi sings—sans Auto-Tune, at that!), raging electro beats, and a rock-rooted single, "Erase Me," which features that other hypercool skinny-jean-clad rapper, Kanye West.—Julie Vadnal

Matt Doyle/Contour by Getty Images

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The ELLE 25

The ELLE 25

Director Davis Guggenheim hopes his new documentary, Waiting for "Superman", will do for education what his An Inconvenient Truth did for global warming. In the legendary Harlem school reformer Geoffrey Canada and the fearless, magnetic Washington, DC, schools chancellor ­Michelle Rhee, the film finds charisma to burn­—and showing us poor kids waiting to hear ­whether they got into model schools might just stand in for Superman as a game-changer. "One of the reactions I get," says Guggenheim, "is, `Oh, you picked the good families, the bright kids.' That makes me really angry. They're all born learners, born dreamers."—Ben Dickinson

When rapper Kid Cudi released Man on the Moon: The End of Day last fall, his emotive hip-hop outcooled every thugged-out MC on the market. Almost overnight, the 26-year-old, dressed in skinny jeans and thick-frame glasses, sold nearly half a million albums, lent vocals to Jay-Z's "Already Home" on The Blueprint 3, and became a lead player in HBO's dramedy How to Make It in America. On September 14, he'll release Man on the Moon Pt. 2: The Legend of Mr. Rager, a sophomore effort that upstages his first, with booming choruses (Cudi sings—sans Auto-Tune, at that!), raging electro beats, and a rock-rooted single, "Erase Me," which features that other hypercool skinny-jean-clad rapper, Kanye West.—Julie Vadnal

Matt Doyle/Contour by Getty Images

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The ELLE 25

Director Davis Guggenheim hopes his new documentary, Waiting for "Superman", will do for education what his An Inconvenient Truth did for global warming. In the legendary Harlem school reformer Geoffrey Canada and the fearless, magnetic Washington, DC, schools chancellor ­Michelle Rhee, the film finds charisma to burn­—and showing us poor kids waiting to hear ­whether they got into model schools might just stand in for Superman as a game-changer. "One of the reactions I get," says Guggenheim, "is, `Oh, you picked the good families, the bright kids.' That makes me really angry. They're all born learners, born dreamers."—Ben Dickinson

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

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The ELLE 25

"I looked at a lot of actresses, but I couldn't cast it for the life of me. Then I saw Jennifer, and I went, `Wow, she's incredible. We need to rewrite the role for her.' There's wells and wells of stuff going on inside her. Her face has the symmetry of somebody who is classically beautiful but looks like she's really lived, not someone who wakes up at noon and puts on a bunch of makeup. That's not something you can manufacture. That's something you're born with."—Jodie Foster on casting 20-year-old Jennifer Lawrence, star of this spring's acclaimed Winter's Bone, as the moody valedictorian Norah in The Beaver

Stevie and Mada (steviemada.com)

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The ELLE 25

"So many people have a secret self that never comes out," Portia de Rossi says. "And I'm just sick of it." In her new memoir, Unbearable Lightness, out October 5, the actress writes about her past struggles with anorexia and bulimia, from her first Jenny Craig meeting at age 15 to the horrors of walking the red carpet for Ally McBeal to desperately trying to burn off the calories from a pack of gum by running circles in a parking lot. But the story has a happy ending: She married Ellen DeGeneres after years spent in the closet—also among the book's topics.—Nojan Aminosharei

Randee St. Nicholas/courtesy of the subject

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The ELLE 25

Four beautifully calibrated performances have Academy Award handicappers already granting front-runner status to two eagerly anticipated love stories. In Derek Cianfrance's Sundance favorite, Blue Valentine, Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams create a piercingly intimate portrait of a passionate marriage going off the rails. The story offers glimpses of a chemistry so joyous and specific that we feel the lovers' anguish almost as sharply as they do. And veteran writer/director Edward Zwick reunites Brokeback Mountain vets Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway as a hotshot pharmaceutical salesman and an artist with early-stage Parkinson's disease in Love and Other Drugs.

Blue Valentine: Davi Russo/The Weinstein Company

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The ELLE 25

It may sound like a classic weeper, but Zwick leavens the sadness with high-flying humor and great sex. Zwick nabbed his own Oscar in 1999 for Shakespeare in Love and was nominated two years later for Traffic. Gyllenhaal, Williams, Hathaway, and Gosling have all earned previous nominations—the first two for their Brokeback work, Hathaway for Rachel Getting Married, and Gosling for Half Nelson. This year they'll be competing with each other, which could make Oscar night a genuine nail-biter. —Karen Durbin

Love and Other Drugs: David James/20th Century Fox

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The ELLE 25

Most blockbuster Broadway plays of late have been 90-minute, small-cast imports, such as Red and God of Carnage. Good as they are, they don't feel very American, in content or scale. By comparison, John Guare's A Free Man of Color, at Lincoln Center Theater this fall, represents the return of the native—not just for Guare, whose House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation anatomized social class in New York City, but for the idea of American epic. A sprawling historical comedy with tragic overtones (and vice versa), Free Man begins in French Louisiana, circa 1802: "in the last moments," as director George C. Wolfe puts it, "before history—in the form of America, just next door—invades."

Michal Daniel/courtesy of the subject

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The ELLE 25

When it does, the title character (likely to be played by Jeffrey Wright) transforms from the richest man in New Orleans to the equivalent of the slaves who run his plantation. What started out as a Restoration comedy turns almost Shakespearean in its consequences—not just for the characters but for the United States, which has been entangled in questions of racial identity and equality ever since. Wolfe, who also directed the epic Angels in America on Broadway, naturally sees that entanglement in theatrical terms. "America feels like this unresolved, incredibly astonishing work in progress," he says. "But is it a well-made play or a vaudeville? Is it a commedia or some kind of Revenger's Tragedy? Any given day it's all of those"—and, no surprise, so is the season's biggest play.—Jesse Green

Courtesy of Lincoln Center Theater

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The ELLE 25

Last winter, the world lost Alexander McQueen, leaving his protégé, 35-year-old Sarah Burton, to carry on his legacy as the house's new designer. (Her first collection—filled with architectural cocktail dresses in snow-white and buff lace, and dramatic gowns in chinoiserie prints—will debut this November.) And Lindsay Lohan's ever-so-short tenure as artistic adviser (along with former chief designer Estrella Archs) for Emanuel Ungaro has ended, making way for British bad boy Giles Deacon to be appointed the brand's new creative director. However you slice it, this year—despite its darker hours—has seen the rising of two bright stars, now at the center of fashion's solar system.—Alexa Brazilian

The ELLE 25

When Martin Scorsese told Sopranos writer Terence Winter he wanted to direct the pilot for Boardwalk Empire, an HBO series Winter had written about prohibition-era Atlantic City, he was thrilled, but not convinced the stars would align. "I thought, I'll believe it when I see it," Winter says. "We were standing on the set the first day and his car pulled up. He got out and started blocking out a scene. I looked to one of the other producers and was like, This is really happening." Scorsese, also an executive producer, makes the inaugural episode feel like a fully realized mob movie, while Steve Buscemi deserves critical gushings for his portrayal of corrupt politician "Nucky" Thompson, who's keeping AC swimming in bootleg liquor. "He reminds me of Bogart," Winter says of Buscemi. And maybe that other compellingly flawed fictional mobster with depth.—Candice Rainey